Communication terminals are becoming increasingly portable while the supported services are becoming increasingly complex and diverse. Moreover, users require services that are based upon the location of the user. 911 emergency services is a ubiquitous example. Moreover, the number of geographical-based services is becoming more prevalent for non-emergency purposes. With mobile users carrying video-capable wireless terminals, for example, these users may wish to obtain information about restaurants in the local vicinity. By including the geographical position of the user's terminal with specific characteristics of the restaurant (e.g., type of cuisine and price range), a content server may provide a menu of a specific restaurant on the terminal's video display. The number of potential geographical-based services is staggering and is only limited by an entrepreneur's imagination.
With the prior art, geographical-based services are typically limited. For example, with Internet Protocol (IP) capable terminals, the location of a user is often predicated on the associated IP address. However, there may be a low correlation between the location and the value of the IP address, particularly if the IP address is static. Thus, deriving the location from the IP address may be very inaccurate. Also, with some wireless standards, such as Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), if a wireless terminal does have locating capabilities, position information may be included in signaling messages that are distinct from messages that contain associated data payloads.
Moreover, specific applications typically support associated services. With geographical-based services, solutions are typically implemented within the application layer or within the physical layer and require special software and interaction with the operator at all the associated nodes.
Thus, there is a real need in the industry to provide methods and apparatuses for supporting geographical-based services that integrate geographical information with existing messaging and that is flexible. For example, geographical-based services should operate transparently even though the geographical-based services may be implemented on different platforms and architectures, including hybrid systems. Moreover, it is desirable that methods and apparatuses facilitate the interfacing of geographical-based applications with the physical layer through intermediate layers such as the network layer and transport layer.